18 Hot Topics... AI is one of them, Duh.

4. The AI software stack will continue to diverge from traditional software.

This will include:

Novel interface mechanisms. One will be voice, both as an input and as the output. The second will be images. Embedded cameras are providing large-scale inputs to machine learning systems: computers can now see. (One example will be the growth of affective computing applications.)

Specialist hardware (think TPUs and other ASICS being made available from a wider array of cloud services) will combine with novel frameworks (TensorFlow and its competitors).

Cloud-to-edge computing as we deliver an increasingly large proportion of intelligence at the locality where it is needed,

A new paradigm of software development (where the best developers nurture highly parameterised models and cajole the training data to feed them).

New development, deployment and testing tooling to support all of the above